In June 1985, the National Museum of Ireland obtained possession of a major hoard of nine bronze objects decorated in an 8th-century style, which were discovered in advance of drainage works in Co. Meath. Its location and contents raise important questions about the genesis of the brilliant art of the 8th and 9th centuries in Ireland. The Keeper of Irish Antiquities begins their publication with some remarks on the unhappy way some of the recent hoards have come to light – concerns that are underlined by yet another episode of looting on a ‘treasure’ site in Surrey.

Navan, Co. Armagh, is one of the major ritual sites of Irish and of European prehistory. Its 2.5 square km encompass the bronze- and iron-age Navan ‘fort’, the bronze-age ritual pond of the King's Stables, the bronze-/iron-age Haughey's fort, and the iron-age ritual lake of Loughnashade – and, surely, other sites not yet detected. It figures largely in the early history of Ireland as the ancient capital of Ulster. For years, a limestone quarry has been eating into the archaeological landscape; its erosion was finally halted last year, thanks to the vigour with which the Friends of Navan fought the archaeological case. Here, one of the founder Friends sets out the issues, and what kind of victory was won.

The sources of tin in the ancient Near East have been a long-standing puzzle. Anatolia is a key area, for it has copper in vast quantities, and silver. Since no substantial or workable deposits of tin seemed to exist in Turkey, an external source for tin bronzes in Anatolia has seemed necessary. The new finds reported here change that picture, as they reveal a major source of the metal in the Taurus mountains, on the south coast of Anatolia.

British archaeology and British archaeologists now live in a fast-changing world. There are new administrative agencies and frameworks, major reviews of monument protection (above, this issue) and of university archaeology (last issue), a fundamental shift in the economics of the countryside (current issues passim), and a new mood in which an entrepreneurial ‘heritage industry’ has become conspicuous.

In 1986 the Environment Select Committee of the House of Commons investigated historic buildings and ancient monuments. Peter Fowler here reports the attitudes it brought to its study of archaeology and history, and the assessments of their value that it made.

Some fundamental problems in the design of wheeled animal-drawn vehicles result from the inescapable mechanical forces the vehicle deals with. Here, one of those problems is explored, with ethnohistorical information from recent Europe as a starting-point.

A British academic abroad may find it hard to explain why his country – with a lower proportion of school-leavers going to university than in almost any other western state – sees no good cause to improve matters. For archaeology, the recent past, as is set out here, has been a story of disordered attrition; the future seems a choice between planned contraction or unplanned decay. Behind this British-parochial dilemma is a wider issue: should archaeology be a vocational training or part of broad liberal-science education? And the concern as to the minimum size of a viable archaeology department has implications everywhere, especially where archaeology is taught as one element in a broader historical or anthropological field.

The homogeneity of settlement across the löss lands of central Europe, and the speed with which an agricultural economy was adopted, are among the more remarkable features of the neolithic colonization of temperate Europe. Now petrographic evidence indicates long-distance transport of stone across that huge area, and confirms that this early pattern comes to an abrupt halt at the transition to the later Neolithic.

The Northumbrian monastic communities, and their crafts, are fundamental to the study of 7th-century Britain. New excavation has revealed significant evidence for the community at Hartlepool, as well as moulds and crucibles from fine metal-working on the site.

Although ‘archaeology and the public’ is very much a matter of current concern, there is still very little actual information about what – if anything – the ‘public’ out there actually thinks of archaeology. The public of Kingston on Hull have been asked.

How many excavators of deep palaeolithic sites, especially in caves or rock-shelters, dig with any clear knowledge of how deep the deposits they are working in actually are, or of the ages of the lower portions? Here an alternative is offered to the traditional approach by a ‘deep sounding’ of conventional excavation. A crucial element to the strategy at Klithi is the possibility of carbon-dating, by accelerator, samples of the small size commonly obtained from a drilled core.

As any parent knows, a metal saucepan turned upside down makes an admirable drum. This simple observation has implications for the evolution of one of the more splendid kinds of ancient bronze artefact.

For all an archaeologist's or anthropologist's professional training in how ancient societies organize themselves with ‘appropriate technologies’, it is not easy to grasp how very different those ancient civilizations were from any society we have experienced. Nowhere is this clearer than in Mesoamerica, where cities and empires had no need of the ‘basics’ of urban life as we know it. One of those ‘basics’ is wheels, discussed here in the sole, small context in which they are commonplace in pre-Columbian America.

The last British minister of education refused ever to use the phrase ‘social sciences’, since these studies were so soft – by comparison with the real hard sciences like physics – they did not count to him as sciences at all. Archaeology, sometimes accepted as a social science, is often placed in the ‘arts’ departments of universities, a conventional word which nevertheless may suggest the creative arts, rather than an attempt at rigorous empirical research. Yet, ever since Sir John Lubbock (1865: 2) said of the new prehistory of the 1860s, ‘a new Science has, so to say, been born among us’, the aspiration of archaeology to the status of a ‘real science’ has been a recurring theme within the subject. Meanwhile, its place in the academic pecking-order stays dismally low. Here a philosopher takes a fresh look at what sort of science archaeology adds up to.

Archaeoastronomy in Europe, when it comes to megalithic sites, is still at the perhaps stage: perhaps there was some systematic understanding of the heavens that can be called astronomy, perhaps there was not. In the Americas matters are different, with the ‘long-count’ and other systems showing a clear interest in calendars, and in the timely movements of the heavens. Here the lunar order of the Maya scheme of things is set out.

The Spitalfields project, now moving from the field to laboratory analysis, takes the archaeological study of human burial into new areas. The preliminary results, reported here, have importance for the archaeology of Christian death and – beyond that – for wider questions in mortuary study and inference from skeletal remains and their disposition.

Thirty years after his death, on 19 October 1957, V. Gordon Childe's ideas seem full of life. Peter Gathercole has watched the Childe literature grow – with three biographical studies, any number of articles and a major conference in Mexico last year (its proceedings will be reviewed in the next number) – and has contributed to it himself. ANTIQUITY invited him to make the points that seem most pertinent about Childe today.

Excavation of Etton, the first British neolithic causewayed enclosure with waterlogged deposits, cleared the interior by the end of 1986. As well as making a cautionary tale as to how different two halves of a seemingly homogeneous site may be, the final areas force some re-thinking of just what this, and other, causewayed enclosures actually were.

The first of a new series of archaeological inventories for Ireland has been published. Christopher Taylor – himself a senior officer of the English commission with the equivalent role – goes beyond Louth to give a personal view of the whole business of published monument inventories.